odds and ands

BETHLEHEM, West Bank - Two Japanese tourists, eager to visit Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, were so engrossed in their guide book they did not notice they had wandered into a war zone.
It was only when news photographers in flak jackets and helmets spotted the oblivious couple and pointed out the bullet-pocked buildings and military hardware around them that they decided to call off their trip to the Christian shrine.
"We have been on the road for the last six months and we did not watch television or read the newspapers," a bemused Yuji Makano told one photographer, who told him the church was the centre of an Israeli siege of Palestinian gunmen.
Makano said he and his girlfriend, Mina Takahashi, had been dropped off by a taxi at a checkpoint near Bethlehem and had made their way along streets torn up by armoured vehicles.
A Japanese embassy official called Reuters requesting contact information for the tourists, saying he wanted to explain the situation to them.
Apart from souvenir vendors, Palestinians normally pay little attention to visitors. But local women and children simply gazed at the two Japanese in stark disbelief.
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RENNES, France - Two youths squirted tomato ketchup in French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's face at his final presidential campaign rally -- and were promptly given a ticking off by the former university professor.
Jospin, whose stern and schoolmasterly demeanour has not always been an electoral asset, took the youths aside outside the hall in the western city of Rennes and gave them a stiff talking to before rejoining his supporters at the meeting.
It has been a dull campaign, although last week two youths threw cream pies at another candidate, centrist Francois Bayrou. Bayrou shrugged off the attack, joking that cream pies were "an occupational hazard" for candidates.
The French vote for their next president on Sunday. That will be followed by a runoff between the top two candidates, almost certain to be the Socialist Jospin and the conservative incumbent, President Jacques Chirac, two weeks later on May 5.
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WASHINGTON - To the untrained eye it looks like a stick insect, but scientists say a new bug discovered in Africa is completely novel and have assigned it to a new order -- the first new insect order established since 1914.
The inch-long (2-cm-long) insect has been named Mantophasmatodea. Three separate species of the new bug have been found in Namibia, Tanzania and preserved in European amber.
Researchers said the Tanzanian insect had been languishing in London's Natural History Museum for 16 years awaiting classification, and the Namibian sample was found among other alcohol-preserved insects in a Berlin museum.
One of the researchers was sent the amber-preserved specimen last year and noted the similarities between all three samples.
The insect appears to eat other bugs, researchers led by Klaus-Dieter Klass of the University of Copenhagen's Zoological Museum reported in this week's issue of the journal Science. Its stomach contents include pieces of bug legs.
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BERLIN - A young German couple hid in a bed shop after closing time and passionately tested the water beds for several hours before being caught by police, officials said.
The couple, aged 17 and 21, were discovered by police in the western city of Porta Westfalica after shop alarms went off as they tried to leave through an emergency exit at midnight.
Police said the shop did not press charges against the young couple and police let them go with a warning about the costs of false alarms.
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WASHINGTON - A seven-year-old Minnesota boy has patented a method for swinging side to side, meaning he could conceivably take playmates to court if they try his new trick without permission.
U.S. Patent #6,368,227, issued April 9, describes a method for swinging "in which a user positioned on a standard swing suspended by two chains from a substantially horizontal tree branch induces side-to-side motion by pulling alternately on one chain and then the other".
Users have up until now only swung in a back-and-forth motion, or sometimes have twisted the chains so that the swing spins when unwound, the application says.
But by pulling on the chains one at a time to induce a rocking, back-and-forth motion, "the present inventor has discovered certain other improvements in the art of swinging on a swing," the application says. "Licenses are available from the inventor upon request."
St. Paul attorney Peter Olson said he filed the application two years ago to teach his son Steven about the patent process. One rejection and $1,000 in fees later, Steven is a certified inventor.
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LONDON - A poignant photograph of John Lennon's blood-spattered spectacles taken by his widow Yoko Ono after the singer's murder sold at auction for 8,813 pounds ($12,720).
Bonhams auction house said an unnamed American buyer bought the photograph after reading about it in the New York Times last weekend.
The image, one of only six prints, shows Lennon's trademark round spectacles beside a glass of water on a table set against a New York skyline.
Ono, Lennon's second wife, took the photograph in the couple's New York apartment outside which the former Beatle was shot dead in December 1980 by obsessed fan Mark Chapman.
The image had been expected to raise between 8,000 pounds and 10,000 pounds, which will be donated to Artist Residencies of Tokyo, a charity that supports aspiring artists in Japan, where Ono was born.

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